Interactive content such as games and participatory stories have the potential to offer immersive experiences in which users can create or influence a dramatic plot through their actions in interactive virtual worlds. Although traditional linear narratives provide little user agency to influence events within a story, the overarching goal of interactive content is to draw the user into a virtual world in which their participation becomes an integral part of the evolution of the storyline, even affecting its outcome.
However, conventional approaches to producing interactive content have failed to overcome the challenges posed by the creation of content having a complex narrative structure while concurrently enabling significant user interaction. For example, conventionally produced interactive content such as computer games often use linear plots interspersed with isolated interactive segments, in which all users experience the same plot during every gaming session. Although techniques for producing so called “branching narratives” in which the narrative outcome depends on user decisions do exist, they typically provide relatively few opportunities for a user to influence the storyline. These limitations on user participation are imposed on conventionally produced interactive content because the authoring complexity of such content grows rapidly with the number of different story arcs and the number of interaction possibilities. As a result, conventionally produced interactive content tends to provide either strong narrative experiences with limited opportunities for user interaction. or compelling interactive experiences having simple narrative structures, but fails to provide content that is both narratively complex and highly interactive.